Sacramento, the debut solo game from artist Delphine of French collective Klondike.
Photograph: The Guardian

Thousands of people filled the halls of the NEC in Birmingham for this year’s EGX to play hundreds of new and unreleased games. While a few big names had an appropriately big presence, the indie-themed Rezzed zone was bigger than ever, and the quirky Leftfield Collection – as always – boasted some of the most interesting games on show. Here are our favourites of all shapes and sizes.

This sequel to Arkane Studios’ 2012 hit sees an adult Emily Kaldwin teaming up with her ageing father and supernatural assassin, Corvo Attano. The game reprises some key notes – an emphasis on stealth and pacifist play – while also adding new ones, such as Emily’s own brand of otherworldly skills. There’s also Flesh and Steel mode, which eschews any powers all together. Backdropped by gorgeous art and environmental design, satisfying gameplay, and the allure of returning to the inventive “whale-punk” universe of the previous game, Dishonored 2 will be a must-have game of 2016.

You don’t have to have played Banjo-Kazooie to enjoy this new crowdfunded game from some of its key creators. Those who hate puns may shy away from characters like Trowzer the Snake, but everyone should be able to appreciate the simple joy of just running around and collecting things in a colourful world.

In Far from Noise, from independent designer George Batchelor, the player teeters on the edge of both an existential crisis and a cliff. Short, funny, and meditative, the game boasts both beautiful art and sound design, plopping the player into the cliffside vintage car, to eventually converse with a stag in a moving set of dialogue (supposedly different every time). It’s currently in the process of being greenlit on Steam.

Like many games that originated in game jams, TV Trouble is limited in scope. You play the role of a TV repair person in the 60s. Presented with a succession of staticy old-timey televisions, your job is to fix as many as you can within the time limit by using different buttons to switch channels, twist dials, and fiddle with the antennae. Another new entry for the strangely satisfying job simulator genre.

Astronaut: The Best is an absurd space-race strategy game where the player must appease a fickle pantheon of gods by training a team of procedurally generated astronauts. One of the first games to come from Fundbetter, an initiative from Failbetter Games, the demo available at this year’s Leftfield Collection from Universal Happymaker was laugh-out-loud funny and refreshingly whimsical. You can currently back the game on Kickstarter.

It might be strange to feel gleeful about sniping someone off the edge of a balcony, but the distance from which you view the colourful world of Tokyo 42 abstracts the action, and the punny writing lightens the tone. It’s all about skill, running and jumping around on rooftops and rotating the isometric camera to line up your next shot. Oh, and there’s a cat.

The 15th instalment in the action-adventure Final Fantasy series from Square Enix, Final Fantasy 15 sees its protagonists on a quintessentially American road trip, battling monsters and making pals to save the world. A supposedly darker departure from previous titles in the franchise, the gorgeous scenery and satisfying real-time combat sequences remain. The game will be released 29 November.

Suitably for a game about childhood fears, the EGX demo for Little Nightmares places you in an oversized house in which a little girl called Six must hide under tables and clamber up cabinets to escape from monsters like the grotesque chef. Her distinctive yellow raincoat may make her stand out to enemies but it also marks her out as a memorable protagonist.

A quiet standout in the Rezzed collection, Forgotton Anne from ThroughLine Games and the Square Enix Collective, is a cinematic 2D puzzle-adventure game with a stunning soundtrack and art design. The titular Anne is an “enforcer” with magical powers over the “anima” which powers the industrial city in which the game is set, and is tasked with exploring it to learn the secrets behind its political unrest. It is due to release in 2017.

Like a pared-down Gone Home, A Normal Lost Phone lets players uncover its story by poking around in a stylised hand-drawn smartphone interface. By reading through messages and cross-referencing the information with dates recorded on the calendar and “photos” in the gallery, you learn the intimate details of the owner’s life.

In a return to the colourful platformer stylings of yesteryear, Snake Pass is the first game to come out of Sumo Digital and lead designer Seb Liese. Inspired by the snake-like motion of a piece of string at a game jam, Liese prototyped the hissing protagonist, and the 3D “action puzzle game” seen in the Rezzed collection this year. Snake Pass uses clever puzzles which use a serpentine back-and-forth movement, and is due to release sometime next year.

This debut solo game from artist Delphine (of French collective Klondike) irresistibly draws the eye with its soft beauty, beckoning the player to explore its surreal environments for mere minutes before it pulls you back to the train station platform on which it began. It’s based on Delphine’s experience of visiting – and then having to leave – California, but even those who haven’t travelled to far-off lands will surely relate to this artistic representation of the inexorable march of time.

Jumpsuit Entertainment and Ysbryd Games have teamed up to offer this self-described “fungipunk fantasy” puzzle game. A combination of sweet colours and cute bunnies in hats belie an underlying nefarious narrative, and add to an overall ethereal charm. This clever and complex puzzler is slated for a late-2016 release.